Egypt (La Mort de Philae) eBook

CHAPTER XV

THEBES BY NIGHT

The feeling, almost, that you have grown suddenly
smaller by entering there, that you are dwarfed to
less than human size—­to such an extent
do the proportions of these ruins seem to crush you—­and
the illusion, also, that the light, instead of being
extinguished with the evening, has only changed its
colour, and become blue: that is what one experiences
on a clear Egyptian night, in walking between the colonnades
of the great temple at Thebes.

The place is, moreover, so singular and so terrible
that its mere name would at once cast a spell upon
the spirit, even if one were ignorant of the place
itself. The hypostyle of the temple of the God
Amen—­that could be no other thing but one.
For this hall is unique in the world, in the same
way as the Grotto of Fingal and the Himalayas are unique.

*****

To wander absolutely alone at night in Thebes requires
during the winter a certain amount of stratagem and
a knowledge of the routine of the tourists. It
is necessary, first of all, to choose a night on which
the moon rises late and then, having entered before
the close of the day, to escape the notice of the
Bedouin guards who shut the gates at nightfall.
Thus have I waited with the patience of a stone Osiris,
till the grand transformation scene of the setting
of the sun was played out once more upon the ruins.
Thebes, which, during the day, is almost animate by
reason of the presence of the visitors and the gangs
of fellahs who, singing the while, are busy at the
diggings and the clearing away of the rubbish, has
emptied itself little by little, while the blue shadows
were mounting from the base of the monstrous sanctuaries.
I watched the people moving in a long row, like a
trail of ants, towards the western gate between the
pylons of the Ptolemies, and the last of them had
disappeared before the rosy light died away on the
topmost points of the obelisks.

It seemed as if the silence and the night arrived
together from beyond the Arabian desert, advanced
together across the plain, spreading out like a rapid
oil-stain; then gained the town from east to west,
and rose rapidly from the ground to the very summits
of the temples. And this march of the darkness
was infinitely solemn.

For the first few moments, indeed, you might imagine
that it was going to be an ordinary night such as
we know in our climate, and a sense of uneasiness
takes hold of you in the midst of this confusion of
enormous stones, which in the darkness would become
a quite inextricable maze. Oh! the horror of
being lost in those ruins of Thebes and not being able
to see! But in the event the air preserved its
transparency to such a degree, and the stars began
soon to scintillate so brightly that the surrounding
things could be distinguished almost as well as in
the daytime.

Indeed, now that the time of transition between the
day and night has passed, the eyes grow accustomed
to the strange, blue, persistent clearness so that
you seem suddenly to have acquired the pupils of a
cat; and the ultimate effect is merely as if you saw
through a smoked glass which changed all the various
shades of this reddish-coloured country into one uniform
tint of blue.